Eulogy for a Decent Man

“No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.”

-John Donne

I first came upon this verse several years ago and was moved by the message that it relays. Naively, I had originally thought that the entire passage was the work of Ernest Hemmingway. Later I learned that Hemingway borrowed a portion of this passage as the title to a book he had written. I have never been much into poetry, but that does not mean that the meaning of this passage was lost on me.

I have been diminished this past week. I received a message from an old friend informing me that a most decent human being had passed away. This news was not the type of thing to be acknowledged and filed away with a touch of sadness, this loss made me sink inside. This world has too few truly generous, kind human beings to let this news speed by like so many other bits of news that we process each day.

Sometimes you have to stop.

Bob Hromika and I crossed paths several years ago when I joined a community of metal detecting enthusiasts. I knew nothing at all about the hobby, and Bob took me under his wing. Bob had incredibly big wings, he took everyone under his wing. As we corresponded in the weeks and months that followed I learned to respect Bob, or Boobie as he was commonly known, as one of those rare people who was just plain friendly to the core. He was always quick with encouragement and advice, a good joke or an invitation to join him on a hunt. He lived his life to a high standard, and I am very happy that I was privileged enough to have known him.

My condolences go out to his loving wife, and to his children and grandchildren.

The tolling of this particular bell has indeed tolled for me.

Godspeed Boobie.

Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens

My wife and I had the pleasure of visiting our oldest child at the University of Pittsburgh a couple of weekends ago. We had not seen her since her Easter break, and between two jobs, a full class load and being responsible for planning several events for a major campus student organization, her schedule had not allowed for an afternoon visit in quite some time. She just smiles, rubs some dirt in the wounds and moves forward to face the next challenge. We are very proud of her and what she has accomplished. Our children all do us proud.

On this particular visit we had lunch at my favorite place in Oakland and then set off for the Phipps Conservatory. I was kind of on the fence about whether this was a good way to spend the day, I really had no idea what to expect. I was stunned by the overpowering beauty and sheer magnitude of what has been put together there. I was delighted with the visit, and would encourage anyone who is in the area to pay the Conservatory a visit. I doubt it will disappoint you.

The Phipps Conservatory is a two acre Victorian greenhouse that was a gift to the City of Pittsburgh by philanthropist Henry Phipps Jr. Phipps was a partner of Andrew Carnegie in the days of Carnegie Steel. Like Carnegie, Phipps believed that along with wealth came a moral responsibility to use some of that wealth to benefit the public at large. He built the conservatory at Oakland in 1893 at the edge of Schenley Park. Since then literally thousands of botanical specimens, both common and rare, have been added to the Botanical Garden's collection. The Conservatory houses a Palm Court, an Orchid Room, a Butterfly Room, a Tropical Fruit and Spice Room, a Desert Room and several more interior displays. Outside there is a Japanese Courtyard Garden, A Kid's Discovery Garden and an Aquatic Garden.

We were also fortunate enough to have gone when they had fine glass work by Dale Chihuly and Hans Godo Frabel both on display as we caught them in the process of moving the Chihuly display out and the Frabel display in. All very nice.

In all I took over 100 photographs, some of which I offer here as a slide show. This is the first slide show I have created in this manner so please forgive me if it goes horribly wrong...

A Tale of Two Well(e)s

Before there was the internet, before there was satellite and cable TV, even before there were TV broadcasts at all the American family gathered in the living rooms of the country to be informed and entertained by a magical box that was the rage of the nation. Americans marveled at the radio, and most were not quite sure how the radio set really worked. Some who were more informed may very well have pondered the oddness of sitting in a room knowing that the ether around them was saturated with the strange waves that brought the radio to life. Regardless of the level of wonder one possessed one thing was for sure. Everyone loved the radio, with the possible exception of newspaper men.

Back in 1938 one of the most eagerly awaited radio shows of the week was the Chase and Sanborn Hour that aired at eight o’clock on Sunday evenings. This program featured, as many of the shows at that time did, interludes of band and dance music to entertain the listeners. What the Chase and Sanborn Hour had that the others did not was the duo of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The show was extremely popular and was far and away the champion of all Sunday evening broadcasts. One would think that a ventriloquist act would lose some of its magic over the radio, but it was popular.

On the evening of October 30th, 1938 countless families gathered around their radios at eight, like they had every Sunday night, to hear Mr. Bergen and his wooden friend. At about twelve minutes after the hour, Nelson Eddy came on the air for a musical performance. Today we may grab the remote and fly through the channels looking for something more interesting to enjoy while the interlude was on the air. The radio listeners of the day dial surfed, and a good many of them at that. Most ended up on CBS expecting to hear the Mercury Theater on the Air show. What they heard caught many of them about as off guard as people can be.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth Farm, Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Well, I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights.

Well then, the listeners thought, what could be so important in New Jersey that would force the regularly scheduled program aside for a live news flash. Maybe we better leave the dial alone and find out what is up.

I just got here, I haven’t had a chance to look around yet. I guess that’s it. Yes, I guess that is the… thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force.

Military airplane crash or possibly, worse yet, a secret weapon from Nazi Germany?

The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What can I see of the object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder.

What the unwitting audience had fallen for was a carefully and brilliantly organized hijacking of the radios of the country that night. The coup was the brainchild of Mercury Theater producer Orson Welles. His show had been consistently haunted with poor ratings because of Chase and Sanborn’s dominance. Tonight however, he would hold the dial surfers in his spell for the next hour and beyond.

The dramatization was of the science fiction novel “War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The story was followed very loosely, with the dialog, geography and technology updated to fit a 1938 audience (the original was first published in 1897). By the time that the fictional Martians started emerging from their cylinders and wielding their lethal heat ray an amazing amount of the listeners began to take it as an actual news story. Panic ensued across the country. A mass hysteria about the Martians advancing on New York threw the entire city into gridlock. The aliens were shooting down planes, vaporizing people and emitting a black poisonous gas that was instantly lethal. What was the use of going back to the other network to fact check these claims? It was far easier to panic and run.

Eventually, at one point in the show, CBS broadcast supervisor Davidson Taylor had received so many reports of the mayhem that he stormed into the studio and halted the play, much to the displeasure of Welles and partner John Houseman. They were to make an announcement immediately that the program was not live news, merely a dramatization of a classic book. The players were led to believe that there were thousands dead in the panic when in actuality nothing but a few bruised bodies, and more than a few bruised egos had been collected throughout the night.

This is Orson Welles ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that the “War of the Worlds” has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be, the Mercury Theater’s own version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying BOO!

Then it was over. People went home feeling very foolish indeed for having been so gullible. The public was outraged over the incident, but as is common with many pranks and practical jokes they regained their sense of humor and laughed at themselves. Orson Welles was tagged a irresponsible broadcaster, then an inexperienced young entertainer and finally a genius. He of course went on to create one of the greatest films of all time, “Citizen Kane”. Undoubtedly that night in New York was what launched the young man's occasionally brilliant career.

One would think that you could never pull this prank off again, but it has been attempted a few times. On Halloween 1968, WKBW radio in Buffalo, New York reworked the skit for their own use and put it on the air. A full twenty one days before the broadcast the station ran an announcement about the coming program every hour on the hour to avoid any panic. Still the Buffalo police fielded nearly four thousand phone calls resulting from panic over the show, and the Canadian National Guard sent troops to the Queenston, Peace and Rainbow Bridges to make sure the aliens did not cross.

Unfortunately another broadcast in another part of the world ended tragically. In February of 1944 a Ecuadorian radio station in Quito attempted the broadcast the play with no advanced warning. The play was being preformed in the El Comercio building that also housed the capital’s newspaper. That night the result was the same in one respect, thousands of citizens frightened out of their wits running around the city. Quickly the radio station announced that the show was a hoax, at which time the citizenry went directly to the El Comerico building and began to riot. By the time it was over the building was burnt to the ground and twenty radio station employees were killed.

Could we be fooled by this same hoax today? I think that we are far too advanced and informed to accept a story of this caliber without fact checking the information we would be receiving and immediately identifying it as a joke. We are the most sophisticated, technologically advanced people who have ever lived. We have the internet to call upon for these questions.

Those folks listening breathlessly to the horrors being witnessed in Grover’s Mills were the most sophisticated and technologically advanced people who had ever lived back in 1938. The radio was their internet, but very few took the time to turn that dial…

Italicized script denotes actual transcript of the 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast.

Lets Make a Deal

Please forgive me for my prolonged absence from my blogging duties. I am a very amateur writer at best, and there are times when I cannot write anything interesting at all. I can think it, I just cant write it. Please accept this short story as a genuine, albeit rusty, apology.

Let’s play a little game.

Let’s pretend that you and I are in Holland in 1638. I am in possession of a small parcel that you are trying desperately to acquire through barter. Your final, desperate offer is as follows:

Two lasts of wheat
Four lasts of rye
Four fat oxen
Eight fat swine
Twelve fat sheep
Two hogsheads of wine (63 gallons each)
Four tuns of beer (a tun was approx 283.5 gallons)
Two tuns of butter
One thousand pounds of cheese
A complete bed
A suit of clothes
A silver drinking cup

Total value, 2500 florins. A very hefty sum in its day. You are a pleasant enough person and I am in a reasonably generous mood, so I accept your offer. Upon delivery of the grain and livestock and beer I will present you with the small parcel. A diamond perhaps? No. Gold? No. A precious ancient treasure? Not quite. You are immensely pleased nonetheless.

You are the proud owner of a single Viceroy tulip bulb.

The tulip was introduced via Constantinople to Europe in about 1600 after enjoying several years of popularity in Turkey. Year after year the bulbs grew in popularity until everyone from the richest to the poorest men in Holland were actively perusing, trading in or collecting any specimens that they could get their hands on. Some would spend half of their life savings on a single bulb just to show it off to friends. Needless to say the tulip market became very lucrative, to the point that a special section of their stock market was dedicated to nothing but the tulip trade.

You are happy because you got a quality bulb at a reasonable price at the height of the bubble. An Admiral Leifken would have cost you closer to 4000, a Semper Augustus would have been a steal at 5500. This particular bubble is referred to by historians as Tulipomania, and like all speculative bubbles this one was bound to burst.

The rich Dutch with substantial tulip holdings began to feel uneasy about the new found wealth producer and began to sell off all of their bulbs thereby flooding the markets and causing panic in the bulb trade. In a matter of a few months you could not unload a tulip bulb if your life depended on it. Fortunes were made and lost, some were just lost. Beggars who were elevated to high society quickly found themselves beggars once more. And, as in most bubble implosions, the folks left holding the lions share of the money that had changed hands did not flaunt it. Many turned it into foreign currencies and investments.

And what about you and your now worthless Viceroy? Like many of the common folk who got caught up in the mania and lost you probably bitterly planted the pricey mistake in your yard or somewhere in the countryside and felt foolish every time you saw it from that point forward. So many were planted that the tulip ranks with wooden shoes and windmills as a Dutch icon to those unfamiliar with the country.

And me? I am secretly drinking your wine out of your silver drinking cup. Perhaps there are contemporary lessons to be learned from the varied fortunes of the Dutch tulip traders over four centuries ago………

I recently read a wonderful book on the ginseng trade called “Ginseng, the Divine Root” by David A. Taylor which reminded me of the Tulipomania story that I had read years ago in a book titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles MacKay. This work was first published in 1841 and many of the examples and accounts used in this post are from this work. The book has chapters on manias caused by slow poisoning, alchemy, Nostradamus, mesmerism and many others. I would encourage all to read both of these works, they are quite interesting.

Old News, New News

A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a discussion with several friends on the EE Ticket.com forum regarding the tragic shooting death of Amanda Collette. Miss Collette, 15, was shot and killed at Dillard High School in Ft. Lauderdale Florida earlier this month. The shooter was apparently a friend, Teah Wimberly, with whom she had argued. This incident is another senseless tragedy in an all too long list of senseless tragedies that play out these days. We offer our hearts to all involved, express our collective outrage at the incident, and wonder once again “what is wrong with people today?” or “what have we become as a society?”. We wonder where mankind went wrong, and where the sanctity and respect for life disappeared to.

On November 28th, this year’s version of the “Black Friday” kickoff to the holiday shopping season, the senseless violence and disregard for human life manifested itself again. A Wal-mart employee was trampled to death by over zealous bargain hunters in New York, and a gunfight erupted in a Toys-r-Us store in Riverside California leaving both gunmen dead. When shoppers were informed of the employee’s death and asked to clear out of the New York Wal-mart, several customers protested that they had waited hours outside to get in and continued their shopping. In Riverside, the gunmen having been the only killed or wounded in a toy store full of adults and children is somewhat miraculous.

Why can’t we as a society just go back to the “good old days”? My belief is quite simple. There were no “good old days”.

I believe that these types of senseless violence are nothing new at all. I think that incidents like the ones described above have always happened in some form. I think that the major difference is that we have access to so much news that some think that it this kind of tragedy is a modern day phenomenon.

My premise is this. All of these awful things that we hear about now, chances are we would have been unaware of not so many years ago. A murder, child abduction or senseless tragedy that takes place today is on CNN and hundreds of other news outlets in minutes. Everyone around the globe sees the event unfold, sometimes with live video feeds. A child abduction or shots fired by a disgruntled employee in small town America that is front page news in 2008, may or may not have made the half hour national news broadcast in 1978, and may not have appeared a newspaper two hundred miles away in 1918. But it still went on.

I am presently reading a terrific book by Harold Schechter called “The Devil’s Gentleman” that brought my thoughts back to the topic of this post. Without giving anything away, the book is about a famous murder that took place in New York City in 1898 that captivated the city at the time. Mr. Schechter points out very accurately that the media circus that ensued was something novel, and was a result of the rise in popularity of “yellow journalism” taking place at about the same time. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were using sensationalism and lurid accounts of crimes to get a circulation advantage for their respective newspapers, the “Journal” and the “World“. He points out that before Pulitzer, the typical New York papers offered some pretty dull reading, including Jay Gould’s World that he had taken over. Shock factor sells newspapers.

Schechter goes on to list some headlines used by these papers at this time.

FIENDISH PARENTS; ALIVE IN COFFIN; A CHILD FLAYED ALIVE; STRANGLED BY ROBBERS and QUINTUPLE TRAGEDY-AN ENTIRE FAMILY INIHILATED BY ITS HEAD!

These headlines, although sensational, did not make up these crimes. They just made them more vivid. They were meant to sell newspapers to a breathless, lurid news craving public. But the facts remain. The crimes reported on by these newspapers did happen. And they happened often.

Over then dozen or so years that I have been researching my family history I have looked through literally hundreds of rolls of newspaper microfilm from the early 1800s to the present day. One thing that has always struck me is that the stories of murder, tragedy and crime that were published in these early newspapers could easily, with some changes in language, be transplanted into your local paper tomorrow very seamlessly. People were senselessly killed, children were abducted, women assaulted and innocent people hurt and victimized just like they are today. The only difference back then was that the vast majority of these events ware reported solely on a local level unless the circumstances were extraordinary.

I offer you an example of something that happened not four miles from where I am sitting right now that happened long ago. It is all but forgotten except by some people who have a good grip on local history, and when it happened the news of it did not get very far from where it happened. This is a story that could easily be posted on CNN today, and we would all wonder what happened to society, and yearn for the good old days.

Back in 1930 a major portion of the land around where I live was deep mined for coal. Small communities, complete with a “company store” sprung up around the mineshafts where most of the local men made their living. Eventually even naming these short lived boom towns became too much of an effort and the mines in my area of the county were simply named after the mineshaft number designated by the mining company. There is a community not far from me that is still known as “Number 5”. Many locals still know the area on the county border near Brent as “Number 2”. It is here at Number 2 that a mass murder took place.

Marco Demifonte awoke on the morning of July 23,1931 and quietly waited until it was time to go to the mine for his shift. His sister in law was in the kitchen having coffee with Marco’s wife. A beginning just like any other day at Number 2, but for Marco this day was anything but ordinary.

Marco stood up and walked upstairs and returned to the kitchen very shortly with a shotgun that he used to hunt blackbirds. He promptly raised the weapon and shot and killed both women as they chatted. He then decided that it was a good time to take a walk through town. His route first led him past the house next door where his neighbor’s wife was out hanging laundry. He raised the shotgun once more and shot her in the head, killing her instantly. As he continued through town he came across nine year old Nick Sicilian playing in front of his house. The boy sensed something was wrong, and began to run. Marco shot the boy twice in the back, knocking him down both times, but the boy got up and ran into the house.

Nick’s mother immediately locked the door. She grabbed a pistol that she had in the house to defend the boy as Marco broke his way in. She tried to shoot him but the safety was engaged on the pistol. Marco shot her in the side and killed her with the butt of the shotgun. When he turned and saw Nick running away he shot him a third time, this time in the legs. He left Nick for dead.

Further into town Marco was confronted by a good friend, a local shoe maker, who Marco turned on and killed immediately. Word had gotten out to call the police, and the shoemaker was trying to slow him down or talk him into stopping. No sooner had Marco’s friend hit the ground when Union Supply company store manager George Masters, armed with a shotgun, came over the hill to help. Marco turned on Masters and pulled the trigger. The gun was empty. Masters immediately shot Marco in the legs while several men captured him and took him to the county jail.

Marco Demifonte spent the rest of his days at the Pennsylvania Institute for the Criminally Insane. George Masters was awarded a silver Carnegie Medal for his heroism that day. The police thought that young Nick Sicilian was dead, and told the funeral director to take him with the bodies of the other victims. A very observant Dr. David Vogan saw that Nick was not dead, and after 43 days in the hospital was released.

Nick’s father went to see Marco in jail to ask him why he had killed his wife and injured his son. Marco said he only meant to kill his wife and her sister because they were plotting against him.

If this same incident happened today it would dominate the national news for three days.

You see, people now are no more crazy or depraved than they were many years ago. A certain percentage of the population will always be. It is just that the whole world is considered “local” news these days.

The Transylvanian Saxons

My son told me recently that he and his cousin Michael had developed a growing interest in their Transylvanian Saxon bloodline. He did not know the historical background of these ancestors, so I decided to pull a page out of our family history book to give them a background on where we came from as a people. Their interest is encouraging because this is the generation that will keep a potentially forgotten heritage alive.



For Michael and Jordan……


Transylvania. The word alone brings to mind lightning plagued castles, darkness and fog, and a pale man with odd teeth wearing a black cape. If asked, most people will inform you that Transylvania is a fictitious land that was created by Bram Stoker as a scene for a story. It was never a real place, or was it?



Back in the 10th century, after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, a land called the Hungarian Kingdom arose between the Byzantine and German Empires. The people of this land were called Magyars, and they were a pagan and aggressive people. The Magyars terrorized western Europe in the first half of the 10th century, looting and burning villages as far away as Spain and northern Germany. In 955, Holy Roman Emperor Otto I handed the Magyars a crushing defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld and ended the Magyars raiding days for good. This defeat was taken as a omen by the Magyar leader Duke Geza, and he converted to Christianity and organized a state.



As the country grew geographically, a problem arose for Geza’s son who was baptized Stephen I. His expanding kingdom did not have enough population to settle on, develop and defend his widening borders. A large portion of the land he had conquered was called Transylvania, or “land beyond the forests”. Stephen had a unique plan to solve his border problem, he would invite citizens of other countries to settle in these lands. He would entice them with land ownership, unheard of for commoners in feudal Europe, and by granting privileges and perks to these guest settlers. Each group could negotiate a deal with the rulers, and the privileges granted were many.



One such group came from Germany sometime around 1200. The Magyars were very short on skilled tradesmen and miners to take advantage of the many natural resources to be found in Transylvania. The German group filled the need perfectly and were able to negotiate a particularly good deal with the Magyars. These settlers were and are still known as the Transylvanian Saxons. For centuries the privileges given to these settlers were honored by whomever ruled Transylvania at that given time.



In 1526 Transylvania fell under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and again the Saxons were well treated, but wars with the Habsburg Monarchy landed Transylvania in their control in 1683. For the next two centuries the Transylvanian Saxons would be systematically stripped of all special privileges due to the Habsburg obsession with uniformity. The Monarchy believed that there should be no ethnic separation in their dominion, and all citizens in Transylvania were pushed down to the same social and political standing as the lowest subject. All were equal and at the bottom of the barrel except the ruling class, just as the Habsburgs liked it. The final insult came with the absorption of Transylvania by Hungary. The Saxons now had no independent identity, no political clout and no country to point to on a map. In 1867 they were treated to the coronation of Austrian Emperor Franz Josef as their King.






Things had deteriorated indeed.







For further information visit:

http://www.saxonlodge.org/



http://www.atsaxons.com/


Upper Picture: Saint Stephan of Hungary, or Stephan 1 from Wikipedia
Lower Picture: Alliance of Transylvanian Saxon fraternal organization logo, Cleveland Oh.

Where The Errand is Going

I think that every once in a while an individual needs to sit down and do some priority adjustments in their lives. I have preached this process to my children many times because I think that it relieves some of the stress that we unnecessarily put our selves through each day, and that can never be a bad thing.

The process is simple. Take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line straight down the center. Label the first column “Things that work for me”, and the second “Things that do not work for me”. They can just as easily be “Thinks giving joy” and “Things causing grief” or anything else your imagination can come up with.

The object of the exercise is to recommit your self to the items in the joy column, and making an honest effort to eliminate the things in the grief column. The more thing you can eliminate in the grief column, the less stressed you will find your life is. I understand it is a very simple minded exercise, but I have found it helpful over the years.

While compiling these two lists in my head recently I found a few things that were no longer giving me the amount of joy that they once did. One was a local newspaper discussion forum that has degenerated into nothing more than a mean spirited attack laden bitch-fest. There are many good people who still frequent these discussions, but they are becoming fewer as the nasty members are driving them away. A week ago they were eliminated from my life.

Another was a metal detecting forum that I had the honor of being a moderator on. It was and likely still is a wonderful place to hand out and discuss detecting, coins, bottles and finds. With all of this going for that fine group of friends, an unfortunate inability to agree with some of the practices at this forum caused my disappearance there .I did not feel an “I am done!!” type of post was warranted, I just simply left my friends to continue without me.

By now you are probably wondering where this post is going. You see, by eliminating my affiliation with these two sites The Errand’s readership has dropped by about 70%, mostly from the former, some from the latter. I had a pretty good run going for a while, and was enjoying the fact that people took the time to actually read something that I had written. So for now The Errand remains in the joy column, and if you are reading this you have my sincere thanks.

The future of my oddball corner of the net is fluid at the moment. The Absorbing Errand concept that lead to its title is from a quote by Henry James that always appears in my title banner. In a nutshell it says to me that the only way that a person can be truly happy is to find a diversion, bordering on obsession, that can take his or her mind away from the grind of everyday life. We all need that, a hobby is a great example.

My problem has always been finding an interest, becoming consumed by it, and at some point losing interest and tossing it aside never to be pursued again. In the last 20 some odd years my mind was filled with baseball, fishing, canoeing, kayaking, a long Civil War research period, family tree research, lighthouses, astronomy, politics, metal detecting, antique medicine bottles, Ancient Roman coins and antiques in general. Rarely do any of these overlap, and typically one had to be pronounced dead before another could begin. I think I may have ADHD.

At the moment I have no true Absorbing Errand. I am caught between a quickly dying interest and the next wave of mania that will drive the next phase of my errand . I still have the history to post here, as I will certainly continue to do. Other subjects and diversions are up in the air at this point.

If anyone stops by from the TT family, I just wanted to say thank you from both of us for your friendship and support. If we do not cross paths again you all will be sorely missed.

As for new friends I have been blessed with, hang on tight this thing could go anywhere…….

Expect a new history post very shortly.